HL2, Portal, CS:S. Valve really hit it out of the park in those days. I wonder how much of Steams success can be traced back to it. Just the Valve catalog alone carried it for me and my friends.
It was about a year before always-on broadband became widespread for everyone. Then it all made sense. It seemed to me Valve wasn't just riding the wave but actively driving it.
I was lucky to be in an area that had very early access to DSL, so it wasn't a problem for me. The "always on" features was actually pretty awesome and novel if you had a permanent connection. In general I've been impressed by Steam from the start.
On the other hand, we can see what the success has caused down the line. Now every publisher wants to replicate it with their own proprietary launchers, undoing all of the cleanliness and centralization that made Steam awesome in the first place.
If anything it's now more confusing than ever to keep track of which launcher has which game and which friends had been added where.
I suppose the total Steam hegemony was always going to be a temporary thing.
It did but it still had problems. You did indeed have to be online initially to "activate" the game but the main problem is whenever it detected there were updates available you were forced to wait for them to completely download before you could play. This led to me being very careful about when I would allow Steam to have internet access. If you weren't careful you could go online and then not be allowed to play HL2 until you spent hours downloading an update (which you couldn't always do until night time because of tying up the phone line). It was incredibly frustrating.
I'm wondering about what cleanliness you are talking about, after all Steam (thankfully) never got a 100% market share (Games For Windows Live, Stardock's Impulse, GamersGate, Matrix/Slitherine, Blizzard games, Good Old Games, Ubisoft's horrible launchers, various boxes-only games, indies...) - if anything it has killed indie gaming that was briefly freed from having to have a full blown publisher and physical distributor - these days smaller developers have a hard time to sell from their own website and sometimes even to just forego from using Steamworks-only services (which make non-Steam versions second class citizens) like multiplayer matchmaking and mod Workshop.
(And some other programs like Xfire have tried to centralize game libraries too, also offering other services like chat, matchmaking, game hour counts, video recording and upload...)
As for pure practicality as a gamer, Steam was unbeatable in the 10's. There were a lot of other offerings like you mentioned, but none were really competing on a large scale. The push of every publisher to restrict their games to their own Steam clones is a thing that seems to really have ramped up during the last ten years or so. Some were early though, Blizzard being a prime example.
That's quite the take. I'd say Valve did more good for indie gaming than anyone else with the introduction of early access. Almost all the indie gaming being done in my social circles is through Steam's early access program. Before that people just didn't play indie games.
And I'm pretty sure people did play (small developer) indie games before - just flash games alone...
I've been using Playnite to consolidate my games list across launchers. It works pretty well once it's set up, except for titles where the launcher you bought it on launches another launcher
That's just comedy. I know this happens for a lot of Ubisoft games in my Steam library. I guess they want to keep the cake and eat it to. Exposure on Steam, walled garden in Connect.
I'll definitely check out Playnite. Thanks for the tip!
Combined in at least one instance with the new version not being able to load the old multi-hours save, and no rollbacks, so hopefully you manually backed up the whole game ! (At least the devs fixed it in a patch after some days...)
I've had updates completely change game balance, making character load outs I'd grinded up not work the way they did before. I've also had new linux versions break compatibility. This is understandable in multiplayer games, but I was playing these games single player.
Honestly CS:S was a bit of a miss—largely considered a failure by the 1.6 community—but it didn’t matter because TF2 came out and was a smash hit.